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Joan Wendoline Clark grew up in Kincardineshire and Sussex. Fluent in French and German, skilled in shorthand and a trained typist, she worked for a time at the Foreign Office in London and at the British Embassy in Paris. In the 1930s she returned with her husband to Scotland and together they settled in Lochaber, where she remained until her death on 6 July 1999. Shortly after her death, her daughter gifted Joan’s manuscript collection to the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies Archives. That collection includes her correspondence and botanical research notes dating from the 1970s right up until 1999, along with three specimen books containing almost 350 pressed wildflowers collected around Onich, Ballachulish, North Uist and Glencoe in around 1976. (from Elaine MacGillivray's blog SSSA in 70 objects: Filling the Creative Well: A Tribute to Joan W. Clark - (right click, open link in new tab: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/sssa/object19/ )) Three foolscap hortus siccus scrapbooks comprising Clark's Taraxacum collection has come to RBGE. D McKean has removed some of these specimens to add to the herbarium collection, but the remainder, still in the scrapbooks, was transferred to the Library's Hortus Siccus collection in April 2023.

Born Edinburgh 1799: died Glasgow 1868.
George Walker Arnott entered the University of Edinburgh aged 14 and took his MA degree in 1818, having already published learned articles on mathematics. He then studied law but abandoned it (due to a dislike of public speaking) in favour of botany, and in the early 1820s went to France to exchange views and excursions with the great French botanists, for a time working in the Paris herbaria. He became famous for his work on cryptogams. He was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1825 and in 1828 the genus Arnottia was named after him. Between 1830 and 1840 Arnott worked with Sir William Jackson Hooker building a reputation as a meticulous taxonomist. His descriptions of new plants from South America, India and Senegambia were published in various journals and he co-operated with Robert Wight in his Illustrations of Indian Botany. In 1837 the University of Aberdeen awarded him its LLD and in 1845 he was elected Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University. In 1850 he collaborated with Hooker on the sixth edition of 'British Flora'. At that time he studied and built up a collection of diatoms. Although ‘disinclined’ to publish, his obituary in the Journal of Botany notes that ‘his marvellous letters … to his numerous working correspondents’ made his scientific observations equally useful. He was also an enthusiastic curler and freemason.
Sources: DNB; Desmond's Dictionary; Jnl Bot 1868; Gard Chron 1868
by D.W.

Professor of Botany at Glasgow University and Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Born Edinburgh 1725; died Edinburgh 1786
John Hope read medicine at Edinburgh University and studied botany in Paris. He was awarded an MD at Glasgow University in 1750 and in 1762 was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. He was appointed physician to the Royal Infirmary and was active in inducing the town council to improve the sanitation of the city. Hope was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, being a foundation fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and, with David Hume, Adam Smith, Allan Ramsay and others, a founder in 1754 of the Select Society. His intellectual passion was botany. In 1761 he became professor of botany and materia medica and also secured a life appointment as the King’s Botanist for Scotland and superintendent of the Royal Garden at Holyrood, Edinburgh. Using family influence, Hope secured Crown funding, to endow a new botanical garden to replace the polluted Royal Abbey Garden and the Town Garden at Trinity Hospital. He moved the rarer plants to a 5 acre site on Leith Walk and this became the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh with greenhouses, ponds and groves arranged on botanical rather than medical principles. In 1763-4 he organised the first British syndicate for importing plant material, especially from North America and he toured English gardens to gather more. Hope himself was an expert plant physiologist, using experimental demonstrations to teach botany, and had a strong interest in systematic botany encouraging his students to explore the flora of Scotland. It was through his advocacy that Linnean teaching gained a hold in Britain. His students became part of an expanding network of plant collectors and one of Hope’s important contributions to science was the creation of an influential school of botanists with international reach.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography; HR Fletcher and WH Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; (R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists); (Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’)
D.W.